DEAR READER: My remarkable mother, who for years supervised Pacific Northwest Bell’s Aberdeen business office, seemed to know everyone who was anyone in town — the mayor, police chief and city clerk — as well as everyone else, without distinction, from the waitresses at the New China Café to the butchers and bakers at Scott’s Grand Central Market.

It helped that her office was on Market Street across from City Hall, adjacent to KXRO and The Aberdeen Daily World, and around the corner from Walt Failor’s Becker Building sporting goods store and café and the Jones Photo Co. In other words, the epicenter of Aberdeen circa 1959.

With a mom like that, I grew up meeting all sorts of interesting people, listening intently to lively conversations. So, it helped that when I was hired to cover the Courthouse in 1966, the first person to greet me was Sheriff A.M. “Pat” Gallagher, the former police chief I had known practically all my life. Avuncular and shrewd, Pat was one of the most popular cops in Harbor history.

I REMEMBER everything about that first day: Pat beckoned me to his inner sanctum, offered me a peppermint Life Saver (his trademark gesture of friendliness), showed me the gruesome crime-scene photos he kept in the center drawer of his desk, and bestowed on me a wallet card that declared I was now a SPECIAL DEPUTY SHERIFF empowered to enforce “the Penal Code of the State of Washington in and for Grays Harbor County & Co. Ord.”

Years later, when I showed my card to our new sheriff, Dennis Morrisette, he laughed, shook his head and calculated that Pat must have handed out hundreds, maybe thousands, of those largely meaningless commissions to boost his stock with the electorate.

Pat, and a host of other characters, come to mind when I recall Mom’s observation that “The best thing about people who were so alive when they were alive is that when they’re gone they’re still here.”

Pat Gallagher is a charter member of that club, together with Bill Jones, the lanky Welshman who preserved so much history as the second-generation proprietor of the family photo studio. Likewise, Nick Yantsin, the Aberdeen Police captain fired for having the temerity to raid the best little whorehouse in town. Or Bronco Tesia, proprietor of the historic Liberty Tavern on the South Side, where rare Croatian dialects could be heard. Or Gordon F. “Brick” Moir, the fearless old Wobbly-turned-communist who was also one of the most moral people I’ve ever known.

For today, however, we will celebrate one of the Harbor’s greatest journalists and historians, Edwin T. Van Syckle. The editor of The Aberdeen Daily World became a mentor when I was editor of the Aberdeen High School Ocean Breeze in 1960. The principal and superintendent of schools were aggrieved when I wanted to write about controversial subjects, such as the hypocrisy of grownups imposing curfews on teenagers while allowing prostitution in our fair city. Van Syckle, an influential member of the School Board, told them to leave me alone.

VAN SYCKLE was an offspring of the Harbor’s famous Fry clan. Born in Cosmopolis in 1902, he grew up immersed in pioneer history, learning Chinook Jargon, the 1850s Northwest trade patois. At 14, he began working summers in lumber mills, earning 75 cents an hour each 10-hour day. After his graduation from Aberdeen’s J.M. Weatherwax High School in 1920, he worked summers in the woods — “felling trees, chasing rigging, whistle-punking, and setting chokers” — to earn money for college tuition.

After college, he published a weekly newspaper in Cosmopolis for two years before Werner A. Rupp, the influential editor and publisher of The World, snapped him up in 1926 to cover the waterfront.

Van Syckle soon won the trust of Captain Ralph E. “Matt” Peasley, a legendary character whose exploits as a lumber schooner skipper were fictionalized in the Saturday Evening Post. In a reminiscence I recorded not long before Van Syckle’s death in 1986, Ed said his youthful daydream had been to sail with Peasley on the Vigilant, a five-masted masterpiece of the shipbuilder’s art.

Then, one day out of the blue, Peasley made it all come true, saying, “Ed, if you really want to cover the waterfront, why don’t you take a trip with me?”

“I ran back to the newspaper,” Van Syckle remembered, sounding more like 25 than 83. “The city editor, Harold Olson, shouted, ‘What a scoop!’ And ‘The Boss,’ Mr. Rupp, who had known Peasley for years, immediately gave us his blessing.”

The rest of the story is one of the best chapters in On the Harbor, the 2001 book I co-wrote and edited. Here’s the postcard version:

LOADED WITH 600,000 board feet of lumber from Blagen’s sawmill at the foot of 8th Street in Hoquiam, the Vigilant lifted anchor for Honolulu without Ed. One of his bags had gone on board the night before, but on departure morning the 8th Street Bridge was open. By the time Ed made it to the dock, the Vigilant was “clear down the bay by Grays Harbor City.”

The enterprising reporter called Frank Hubble, his favorite tugboat captain, who dispatched one of his boats to give him a lift.

“We caught up to her on the bar,” Ed recalled. “The tug was surging on the waves and so was that beautiful windjammer. At the top of the surge, I threw my bag aboard her, and on the next surge I grabbed the Jacob’s ladder and scrambled aboard.”

Those 60 days at sea were among the highlights of Van Syckle’s long, eventful life. He sent several articles home from Hawaii via amateur shortwave radio. Editors up and down the coast took notice as the Associated Press reprinted some of his stories.

Van Syckle told me his dream job was to become maritime reporter for the Oregonian, then the Northwest’s leading daily. Twice rebuffed, he concluded they didn’t deserve him. In my view, that was true. In any case, it was Portland’s loss and the Harbor’s gain.

Though it was tough sledding on the Harbor during the Depression, with steep pay cuts at the newspaper, as everywhere, Rupp nurtured his star reporter, assigning him to help write editorials. “I Am War,” a chilling piece Van Syckle wrote in 1939 when Hitler’s juggernaut invaded Poland, was reprinted nationally.

After the war, Van Syckle and his pal, Ben K. Weatherwax — founder of the Harbor’s second radio station, KBKW — began swapping stories and comparing notes for Weatherwax’s popular “Hometown Scrapbook” radio show and a book that had been germinating in Van Syckle’s brain for decades.

In 1951, W.A. Rupp, his health declining, named Van Syckle executive editor to oversee The World’s talented newsroom. It featured Barbara Elliott, the paper’s first female reporter, and future managing editor Adrian Fredericksen, a University of Washington Journalism School standout. Van Syckle poached Fredericksen from Hoquiam’s morning daily, the Grays Harbor Washingtonian, to become sports editor. “Ade” soon switched to the news side as an ace investigative reporter and feature writer.

WHEN THE ham-handed new owners of The Aberdeen Daily World unceremoniously pushed Van Syckle into retirement at 67 in 1969, they did history a great favor. He now had time to finish his book, which became the definitive history of logging and lumbering on the Harbor. They Tried to Cut it All was published by the Friends of the Aberdeen Public Library in 1980 with a grant from altruistic lumberman Henry N. “Heine” Anderson. (One of my retirement goals — shared by Polson Museum Director John Larson — is to publish a new illustrated edition in large format.)

The River Pioneers, an important sequel, was published in 1982. It was a treat to have been trusted by Ed to research several chapters, notably the ones about Aberdeen’s Irish founder, Sam Benn, and Charley Gant, the vagabond editor who delighted and scandalized Hoquiam back in the day.

A first-rate carpenter, Ed built a handsome house for his sister-in-law, and in his spare time (!) took up art. His wonderful painting of pedestrians across the street from Aberdeen’s then-new library on a drizzly day is now on display near the checkout desk. When the library was under construction, he often paused from his desk on the second floor of the World Building to admire the brick-masons’ work.

During his 17 years as a member of the Aberdeen School Board, which then oversaw Grays Harbor College, Van Syckle played a key role in selecting its new hillside campus, a prescient decision long before tsunami concerns. He also served on the Library Board for 10 years; as an Aberdeen City Council member; as an elder of the Aberdeen Presbyterian Church, and as a founding member of the Aberdeen Museum of History. One of the countless tragedies of the fire that consumed its Armory home in 2018 was the loss of the manifest from Ed’s 1927 voyage on the Vigilant.

He liked to say he was “a man of parts.” Above all, he is a man to remember.

John C. Hughes was chief historian for the Office of the Secretary of State for 17 years after retiring as editor and publisher of The Daily World in 2008.